White House quietly debates high-tech option

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The Pentagon and the NSA considered orchestrating cyberattacks to diminish the Syrian military’s ability to launch devastating airstrikes such as this one Monday in Aleppo.

By David E. Sanger
New York Times
February 25, 2014

WASHINGTON — Not long after the uprising in Syria turned bloody late in the spring of 2011, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency developed a battle plan that featured a sophisticated cyberattack on the Syrian military and President Bashar Assad’s command structure.

The military’s ability to launch airstrikes was a particular target, along with missile production facilities. “It would essentially turn the lights out for Assad,” said one former official familiar with the planning.

For President Obama, who has been adamantly opposed to direct US intervention in a worsening crisis in Syria, such methods would seem to be an obvious, low-cost, low-casualty alternative. But after briefings on variants of the plans, most of which are part of traditional strikes as well, he has so far turned them down.

Syria was not a place where he saw the strategic value in US intervention, and even such covert attacks — of the kind he had ordered against Iran during the first two years of his presidency — involved a variety of risks.

The Obama administration has been engaged in a largely secret debate about whether cyber arms should be used like ordinary weapons, used rarely as covert tools, or ought to be reserved for extraordinarily rare cases against the most sophisticated, hard-to-reach targets.

And looming over the issue is the question of retaliation: whether such an attack on Syria’s air power, its electric grid, or its leadership would prompt Syrian, Iranian, or Russian retaliation in the United States.

It is a question Obama has never spoken about publicly. He has put the use of such weapons largely into the hands of the NSA, which operates under the laws guiding covert action. As a result, there is little of the public discussion that accompanied the arguments over nuclear weapons in the 1950s and ’60s, or the kind of roiling argument over the wisdom of using drones, another classified program that Obama has begun to discuss publicly only in the past 18 months.

But to many inside the administration, who declined to speak for attribution on discussions about one of the United States’ most highly classified abilities, Syria puts the issue back on the table. Obama’s National Security Council met Thursday to explore what one official called “old and new options.”

One of the central issues is whether such a strike on Syria would be seen as a justified humanitarian intervention, less likely to cause civilian casualties than airstrikes, or whether it would only embolden US adversaries who have themselves been debating how to use the new weapons.

Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, argues that it is “worth doing to show that cyber operations are not evil witchcraft but can be humanitarian.”

But others say such an attack could be perceived differently.

“Here in the US we tend to view a cyberattack as a de-escalation — it’s less damaging than airstrikes,” said Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has recently published a book titled “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “But elsewhere in the world it may well be viewed as opening up a new realm of warfare.”

Internally, Obama has made no secret of his concerns about using such weapons. He narrowed Olympic Games, the program involving use of the Stuxnet computer worm against the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, to make sure that it did not cripple civilian facilities, including hospitals.

What he liked about the program was that it was covert, and that, if successful, it could help buy time to force the Iranians into negotiations. And that is what happened.

But when a technological error resulted in the broadcast of Stuxnet around the world, ultimately leading to the revelation of the program’s origins with the NSA and Unit 8200 of Israel, Obama’s hopes of keeping such programs at arm’s length were dashed.

Since then, there has been no clear evidence that the United States has used the weapons in another major attack.

The head of the NSA, General Keith B. Alexander, said in an interview last year that such weapons had been used only a handful of times in his eight-year tenure.

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